“But Mason can’t have been dead for a week,” Vivian said. “We’ve seen him several times since we got here. And we haven’t been in town that long.”
“Only one thing makes sense,” I said. “The Mason we’ve been interacting with wasn’t really him.”
“An imposter?” Josh asked.
I shook my head no. “We were deceived by a walking dream created by Brielle using the stone.” I remembered the woman-shaped mist that escaped me outside of the White Lotus Restaurant. “Vivian, she’s the one working with your father. With her on his side, using the dream stone, he didn’t need the wolves anymore. What do you want to bet that he somehow lured the Spirit Bear to the wolf compound to get rid of them? They knew he was in town. That made them a liability once he decided to change allies.”
“Damn!” she said. “It makes sense.”
“Let’s get out of here.” We returned to the outer lobby. The elevator had run down the shaft and was now returning.
Joshua said, “Company coming.”
“They’ll be in the stairwells, too.” I thought about things and devised a hasty plan. We needed to move fast. Better not to have Josh change to liger now. After all, I had a job that need strength, and Vivian’s was far above human level. I turned to her. “Vivian, I need you to pry open the elevator shaft doors here before the car arrives.”
She silently leaped to them, whipped out her combat knife, and forced it in with a scream of metal. That gave her strength focus. Soon, she had a gap her fingers could get in, then her shoulder and head. And then the doors were rolling back in their groove. The shaft was on full display, the cables moving as the machinery ran. One by one, I pulled the pins on all my grenades and dropped them down the shaft. Seeing what I was doing, Josh added his own.
And then we were running back, ducking for cover. The grenades detonated in the shaft. Shrapnel rained inside it. The steel cables on the elevator were shredded. I waited, counting the seconds until the car hit bottom.
Such a beautiful sound.
“To the stairs” I said. “Let’s see how many more of them insist on dying to keep us from getting out.”
There were about twenty more dead by the time we reached the ground floor. Most had M14s with suppressors that did no good against my shield. I simply warned my guys; “Close your eyes,” and pulled the pins on some flash bangs that put out high UV light.” Dhampyrs shared the vampire’s sensitivity to ultra violet radiation. Pulling her head inside her coat spared Vivian discomfort and blindness.
We strolled out of the building. Vivian and I stowed our weapons away under our longcoats. Josh didn’t bother. On the next block, we passed a meter maid. She froze in shock seeing Josh’s shotguns. She relaxed when Josh flashed a federal badge at her, saying, “Don’t worry about it.”
Soon we were back at our vehicles, driving off on the next leg of the mission.
Brielle, you’ve got something of mine and I’m coming to get it.
THIRTY-ONE
“Once I hammer the puzzle-pieces into place
the simple beauty of slaughter can begin.”
—Caine Deathwalker
Our vehicles cut across the heart of the Greenhaven suburbs. Osamu drove Kimberly in the moss green VW bug, staying behind my Mustang. I wanted her near as a consultant on the dream stone, but not underfoot during the battle. I trusted Osamu to keep her alive if some of the fighting spilled over on them out front. I’d had Josh call in a few favors. Officially, this was a PRT operation and the police were told to stay clear, no matter what complaints were phoned in by the neighbors.
We turned onto Moonlit Circle, nearing our prey. The anticipation of blood already had me hard, as did thoughts of Brielle. Now that I knew she had the dream stone, all that remained was my last-second decision on exactly how I’d kill her. That would depend on circumstances at the end of the battle. Battle plans were usually pretty mangled by actual battles. Nothing ever went as expected. I’d learned from experience not to guess what an enemy might do, but to be prepared for anything they could do. I muttered to myself, “Thinking always slows me down.”
There was a brief lull in the background chatter. In the front passenger’s seat, Vivian nodded in sad sympathy, but neither she nor Josh commented on what I’d said. I threw her a cold stare. “Shut up!”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Yeah, but your silence was deafening.” I rolled my shoulders, still adjusting to the fit of the Kevlar armor under my longcoat. Lightweight, matte black, it had carbon micro-fibers inside that made it much stronger than other types. I’d super-glued the small mirror I’d gotten from the troll onto the chest. In a pinch, linked to mirrors back in Malibu, the small mirror could be used to replenish ammo and booze. The mirror also let Old Man watch events around me, taking a hand in battles now and then if he wanted to.
I remembered six months back during that red moon business, one of Old Man’s oversized blue forearms had magically poked out of the mirror, as if I’d grown a spare arm in the middle of my chest. He’d fired off a lightning bolt at one of my enemies while I was being hard-pressed.
Such fun!
My nimble fingers ran over all the gear velcroed on: flash-bang grenades, smoke bombs laced with garlic, a sheathed Seal Team knife—partly serrated with glass reinforced nylon grip, ninja throwing spikes, and clip after clip of assorted ammo. Unlike my stolen zombie-apocalypse suit, my current outfit lacked sheathed short swords across the back.
I gripped the wheel tightly, bracing myself as I warmed my Dragon Sight tattoo to life with a thought. The sensation of both lungs exploding into so much cottage cheese passed quickly. I used the same dragon magic as last time I’d come, sweeping the street for traps laid by dhampyr magic.
Nothing. The sense of curious, magical tendrils was gone. No one was watching the approach to the mansion. The gates were wide open as well. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.
Climbing the drive to Brielle’s mansion, the root beer colored Mustang rumbled like a starving beast about to pounce. The overhead sky was a red haze framing dark clumps of cloud. A hint of rain lingered in the breeze that shivered the trees. There were no cars in the drive. Probably in the big-assed garage, or parked down the block. Imagining tears if the dhampyr got their expensive cars riddled with bullets, I smiled.
The mansion lights burned on every floor. Pale faces wearing sunglasses hovered in the windows, cautiously peering out, exposing as little as possible.
Waiting on the front porch, two Dhampyr guards wore black suits—a common uniform for thugs, as well as black gloves and sunshades. Their suits were strained. Apparently, they hit the gym often. Bulges in their jackets indicated holstered weapons.
The limo had stopped on the drive, well back from the front entrance. With the tinted windows, one person could have been inside, or an entire hit squad. Its presence alone served as a source of agitation to the dhampyr guards. Not that I was going to give them time to get too concerned. I spun the vehicle so its nose faced the guards on the porch.
“Show time!” I shoved open my door, and slid out.
Vivian did the same.
Josh bailed on her side of the vehicle, already coming out of his clothes as they tore off his swelling, gigantic frame. A growl of pain escaped him, a sign he was pushing the shift faster than was wise.
I ran for the front door, my red shield flickering to life, deflecting bullets out of my face. Vivian ducked behind me for cover, following closely. I thought I’d beat both of my friends to the guards this time. Didn’t work out that way. Josh, now a snarling, gold furred behemoth, fell out of the sky, onto the top of my shield, his claws scrabbled for a hold. Deflecting bullets, my barrier stayed hard, providing a stepping stone to the battle. Josh sprang once more. He went up against the second floor of the building, exploding inward through broken glass. Multiple shots erupted in the house.
Then, I had no thought to spare for Josh because we were in striking range of the dhampyr gu
ards on the porch. Seeing their guns were useless, they braced themselves, as if they could roll back my shield with brute force. Their hands flattened on the barrier as their bodies strained. It was stupid really, them making themselves so vulnerable.
Vivian took a page from Josh’s book, vaulting onto my shield, sliding over its dome, and down in front of me. While still high in the air, she executed a split, double kick to the head of both guards. Her boots’ stiletto heels punctured one man’s eye and the other man’s temple. As they crumpled, she landed between them. She finished them off with combat knives, slicing across their throats. Lovely, crimson blood burst from pale flesh, spraying the air with ever lessening force until their hearts stilled.
Her knives caught my attention, red runes set in black iron. There was also a death’s head motif inside spiral lines; a screaming skull—eternal death. The blades slightly darkened the air around them with the shadow-aura of captured souls. These were demon-forged blades, cursed weapons able to break the healing power of supernaturals. If this was standard Slayer issue, I’d have to check into their supplier. They might have some unique toys they’d part with, for a price.
Without a backward glance at me, Vivian surged against the closed door, lashing out with a kick. How her heels didn’t break was a mystery, but then, I didn’t know how she could run around on them—looking so hot—and have any kind of balance. The stems were incredibly thin. Titanium, maybe. Possible made by elves.
Unfortunately, the door was not impressed. It shivered under a second kick, but showed no sign of yielding.
In the absence of an immediate threat, my shield thinned away. I stepped forward, one of my new Beretta PX 4 subcompacts in my left hand, and nudged her out of the way. “Let me give it a try.”
She looked at me with skepticism, doubting my manly prowess, but drew aside. I reached out with an empty right hand, fingertips tracing the pattern of the grain. My invoked Dragon Sight tattoo was still active, letting me see a red glow that sheeting across the wood. The entrance was reinforced with dhampyr magic. The wood would resist brute force and magical assault as well.
The dhampyr inside had forgotten one thing, however. Doors open from both sides. I fed life force into my Dragon Voice tattoo. Pain shredded my nervous system, as if someone had stabbed me in the back, and then proceeded to cut a spiral coil down my torso, front to back, on and on. I made a point to grit my teeth and not bite through my tongue until the agony ghosted away. I swallowed the scream that had caught in my throat, and forced my raw voice into use, yelling through the door to the inside guards. “Open the damn door so I can kill you!”
Vivian snorted in a very unladylike manner. “Like that’s going to work.”
There came a rattle of locks and the door was hauled open from the inside. The magic door had stopped everything but the power of my voice.
Vivian stared. “How’d you do that?”
“Less talking, more killing.” My gun bucked in my hand, spitting flame as I emptied a full clip of explosive rounds that shredded dhampyr hearts and brains, splattering the foyer with blowback. We entered the foyer, stomping across the bodies, looking for a few with some life left in them. I changed the clip in my weapon, letting my shield haze the air between me and the living room where some of the dhampyr were shooting from behind assorted furniture.
“I got this.” Vivian crouched low, hugging the outer edge of the doorway as she careful squeezed off shots. The edge of the door splintered as the dhampyr inside tried to put her down. A thin line of blood appeared where a chip of wood cut her check. As she smelled her own blood, the pale pink of her eyes deepened to a frosty ruby, reminding me that she was no common dhampyr, but had the blood of a master vampire in her veins.
“Fine, have fun.” I tossed a couple smoke grenades into the room and strolled toward the dining room. We needed to clear the ground floor before moving upstairs where I expected the Brielle to be holding court.
I entered the dining room, turning toward the part of it I hadn’t been able to see. My shield caught a hail of incoming bullets. The lead slugs flattened midair and dropped to the floor, bouncing and tumbling.
With a thought, I summoned my demon sword from my armory under the Malibu house. The Muramasa blade was straight, not curved like most katana. Unlike Osamu’s demon blade, my sword was elegantly simple, without jewels or a fancy design on the hand guard. I tightened my grip on the gray-green, crocodile skin that wrapped the hilt, and I glowered at the dhampyr that insisted on emptying their clips at me.
Too stupid to live.
In my hand, the normal blue steel was awake, its demon aura a murky red glow. The blade whispered in my thoughts, urging me to use it in an orgy of excess, flooding the world with blood. The blade was as much an opponent as the dhampyr. It would do its best to drain my will, to make me an extension of it instead of the other way around. Therefore, I limited my exposure to emergency situations.
I grinned at them as they ran out of ammo and scrambled desperately to reload. One of them came from the back of the crowd, pushing forward. He had a pump-action shotgun in both hands, swinging the muzzle up to unload on me.
I willed my shield down, firing with one hand, swirling in to catch the shotgun barrel with the tip of my sword. I angled the barrel to the side and let the shotgun belch death into the face of another dhampyr. The face vanished in a crimson froth. The body hit the floor, joining the others I’d shot. The explosive rounds I used effectively scrambled enough gray matter so the dhampyr couldn’t regenerate the damage. They stayed down.
The sword in my right hand keened, voicing its hunger. I loped off the head of the dhampyr with the shotgun. As his corpse fell backwards, glimmering gossamer strands of silver-blue energy spun out of his chest, gathering around my sword blade like spun sugar. I shot the last of the dhampyr in the room, as my demon blade thrummed in pleasure, swallowing the dhampyr soul. Its appetite whetted, the blade shrieked for more.
“Greedy bastard,” I said, “just be patient.”
The upstairs was quiet. Too quiet with Josh up there. Well, he was former PRT. He’d just have to deal with things until we were done down here. I still had the adjoining kitchen and garage to check out.
From the sounds of the fighting in the living room, guns had been exhausted. Furniture was being broken along with bodies. I heard male cursing and a shrill scream of female fury. Vivian was holding her own.
So far, so good.
Stepping on and over bodies, I approached the kitchen door. By the floor, a glint caught my eyes. Having been blown off someone’s head, a slightly pointy dhampyr ear lay on the floor. The glint was caused by a diamond stud erring on the lobe. The stone was two carats, in a four prong, red-gold setting. Some buried part of me stirred awake and made a casual evaluation. Eleven thousand, four hundred dollars, give or take a few bucks. I hunched down and picked up the ear, tear off the earring, putting it in a pocket.
Waste not want not.
Boom … boom … boom. The door above my head exploded from the inside as shotgun slugs ventilated it. I stayed low, looking up. The shots had been tightly grouped, making a hole roughly a foot wide. Wood chips lay across my back and in my hair. I waited very quietly, listening for footsteps to approach. Soon, someone was going to stick their face in that hole to see if they got me.
Sensing my intention to feed it, my demon sword was silent with anticipation, not wanting to scare off our prey.
I heard a gruff whisper from the kitchen, “Well? Did you get him?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“Look through the hole, stupid!”
Yeah. I smiled. Look through the hole.
THIRTY-TWO
“There’s tragic, hella bad, God-
awful, and then there’s me.”
—Caine Deathwalker
A man’s face peered out of the hole in the door. Not an ugly face, at first, but it got that way fast thanks to the demon blade I drove upward. The sword tip entered the fleshy
underside of his jaw, cut into his mouth, stilling his tongue, and burned its way through his brain, emerging from the inside of his skull to give him a point on his head. Not quite convinced of its death, the dhampyr’s body tried to jerk clear of the hole, but the sword didn’t allow escape. It blazed bright red, slurping up the silvery-blue soul that had come loose from dying flesh.
The sword thrummed with glee, temporarily sated as I jerked it down, letting the corpse collapse back into the kitchen.
“Mother of God!” someone said.
I slipped to the side, flicking the sword out of my hand, letting it vanish back into the ether on its way home.
More holes filled the door top to bottom. These were much smaller, making the wood look like alpine Swiss cheese. Slugs passed me. One passed so close to my cheek; I felt the superheated air of its wake. As a lull arrived, I detaching a couple flash-bangs from my vest, pulled the pins, and chucked the grenades through the big hole. Someone screamed a warning.
Bampfff—bampfff!
After the grenade detonations, I shouldered through the kitchen door, staying low to the checkered tiles so the dhampyr soldiers—firing blind—would miss. And there were dhampyr firing blind, rubbing their smarting eyes, stumbling into each other.
“What the hell!” one said.
“Who’s touching me?” another said.
I popped up next them, using my death-is-near voice, “I am, fuck-face.”
I leaped away and gratified to see the two dhampyr throttling each other with fervent strength. Other soldiers wheeled their way and unloaded weapons. A few of the blind shots came my way but my protective shield firmed up and deflected them as needed. Not wanting to be left out, I spun with both PX 4s in hand and fired, passing out headshots all around. In moments, I was the only one alive in the kitchen.
I returned to the dining room, and then the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t have to go looking for Vivian. She came toward me, face swelling with what promised to be a helluva bruise—though with her healing power, the bruise wouldn’t be there long. Her lip was split, her knuckles skinned, her clothing half torn and drenched in blood. One tit bounced free, a bloody scratch near the nipple.
Green Flame Assassin (Demon Lord series, book 2) Page 23
